Month: May 2017

Lyrical and deadly, much like its historical inspiration, The Girls unfolds from the memories of a former member of a Manson Family-like cult, Evie. She starts to reminisce about her wayward summer when sharing a beach house with two teenagers who are (understandably) fascinated by her past. By framing her novel this way, Emma Cline casts a light back onto the reader, who undoubtedly shares the morbid fascination with the murderous cult.

So unfolds a story about losing oneself. Cline’s novel becomes an untraditional ‘coming-of-age’ where innocence isn’t so much lost as it is slowly siphoned away by a calculating predator. She peels away the gritty, movie-like glamor with which many see the Manson family and often narrows in on banal details: the food they were eating, the cleanliness (or lack thereof) of the rooms, sleeping arrangments.

Cline resists the urge to make our protagonist a sticky sweet ingenue who deserves our pity and instead paints a more nuanced picture of a girl without roots. Rather than fall into the thrall of the Charles Mason-like-leader (dubbed Russell) she is under the spell of the enigmatic and seemingly carefree women who surround him. Reading the book, I recalled a long-rehashed conversation from my college days, in which a guy friend wondered aloud about women’s fashion, pointing out that it took very little in the way of fashion prowess to impress men. This prompted a lively debate. Women didn’t get dressed to impress men, the girls of the group insisted, they got dressed to impress other women. To date, I think there is a lot of truth to this statement. Who better to accept judgment from than a group of our peers?

Despite its grisly inspiration, The Girls never waded quite as deep as I’d wanted it to. The real Manson, in addition to being charming, was also sadistic and vicious; this is never fully explored. Nor so are child neglect and the cruelty of his followers. But that Cline captures an enigmatic world and weaves transfixing tale, there can be no doubt.

This one is not for the faint of heart. The novel introduces a constellation of characters at the start, and it is difficult to see how they are all going to fit together. But fit together they do, as each plays a role in the covering of a brutal murder.

Less mystery and more thriller, Out almost reads like a journalistic expose. I never got the sense that the author wanted to me to root for any particular character, and she wasn’t shy about introducing unflattering elements – a lot of the point-of-view characters are ones that most of us would be unwilling to call friends. In many ways, the hard-to-identify-with characters became the most interesting. [Author] does an excellent job teasing out motivations and painting a picture of an often bleak and depressing Tokyo.

Out’s Tokyo is less a futuristic and culinary wonderland, and more of a bleak automaton, chugging along only due to the efforts of struggling working class people. I really enjoyed Kirino’s strengths for creating atmosphere, and her willingness to embrace some pessimism rather than attempt to staple on happy endings for all the characters.

It is a relatively hefty book. (The copy I obtained from the library clocked in at about 500 pages.) That disclaimer aside, I poured through this one like water – it was gripping and I never lost momentum.

I did this one backward: I saw the movie first. Earth, the gorgeous interpretation by Deep Mehta, left a deep impression after I saw it in college. Thus, Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel has been on my list for many years, although the tragic subject matter caused me to procrastinate.

Unsurprisingly, I’m glad I finally picked it up. Sidhwa has a distinct writing style: frank and youthful. The setting is Lahore before the portion of India, and the narrator is an inquisitive and happy-go-lucky Parsee girl named Lenny. Because of her age, the reader often finds themselves trying to push back the curtain of Lenny’s naïveté to see what’s really going on with the adult characters that surround her. Ultimately, it is not Lenny who provides the dramatic tension in the story, but her ayah, a beautiful Hindu woman who has enchanted the men of the neighborhood.

A love triangle unfolds as political and religious tensions start to boil over, leading to betrayal and tragedy. As with The Devotion of Suspect X, unrequited love is a major theme and you come to sympathize with the character who, in the hands of a less thoughtful writer, might be the “bad guy”.

However, the historical basis for Cracking India renders it more impactful, and a book worthy of a later rereading.

(I re-watched the film after finishing the book and am happy to say that it held up well.)

Gripping and memorable. Very happy that I picked up this slim, vividly colored novel.

The beginning of the end is when the protagonist’s husband walks in to find her hunched over the floor, surrounded by trash bags and Tupperware containers full of frozen meat. It’s a vivid image, and like many other scenes in the novel, I found myself having an almost visceral reaction to the struggles of the main character as she attempted to navigate her new revulsion in the face of meat.

This concise novel is broken up into three parts: her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister all narrate different sections. Crucially, we don’t receive narration from the titular character although we are given glimpses of her thoughts through brief italicized sections. She feels removed to us, which is pertinent when we consider how in real life we are often removed from those people who are acting in ways contrary to the norm. Raising our eyebrows and making meaningful eye contact with fellow bus passengers, we do our best to ignore those people whose behaviors make us shift with discomfort, or force us to confront the gaps in our society.

What does it mean to be alive? What separates human from animals? How can we retain autonomy over ourselves and our bodies when society asserts control over our physical and mental selves? This would be a great book club pick: there’s plenty of questions and themes for a meaty conversation. (Yes, pun intended.)

Bare in mind that despite the title, vegetarianism isn’t really a central theme. The author isn’t trying to coax you into reconsidering your cheeseburger lunch. That said, it wouldn’t hurt to plan on just a salad after reading.